He was standing near a bath over the
earl and, strange to say, his beard was red. There was the bath
with the red lamp over it; and this brought the story to my mind.
"The vision seen by the duchess was told two weeks before the
death of Lord L--. It is a most remarkable thing."
7
But it is impossible to find space for the many instances
related. As I have said, there are hundreds of them, making their
tracks in every direction across the plains of the future. Those
which I have quoted give a sufficient idea of the predominating
tone and the general aspect of this sort of story. It is
nevertheless right to add that many of them are not at all tragic
and that premonition opens its mysterious and capricious vistas
of the future in connection with the most diverse and
insignificant events. It cares but little for the human value of
the occurrence and puts the vision of a number in a lottery in
the same plane as the most dramatic death. The roads by which it
reaches us are also unexpected and varied. Often, as in the
examples quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Sometimes, it is an
auditory or visual hallucination which seizes upon us while
awake; sometimes, an indefinable but clear and irresistible
presentiment, a shapeless but powerful obsession, an absurd but
imperative certainty which rises from the depths of our inner
darkness, where perhaps lies hidden the final answer to every
riddle.
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